In their hundreds they come, scuttling and scratching to her call. Is the princess offended by this verminous surge? Squeamish? Not at all! Merrily, merrily to work; Giselle sings and dances, the rats do the washing-up, the pigeons — their soiled wings beating — fold the laundry, and in the bathroom a friendly horde of roaches boils up from the plughole, munching through layers of scum: after 2.3 seconds, the tub is sparkling.

The makers of Enchanted are saying a couple of things with this scene, I believe. They are saying, first of all, that nothing is too f’d-up for Fairyland; that the creeping things of the street are no less its citizens than the mermaid or the unicorn. And they’re saying, too, that a proper respect for the fairy tale, with its thrones and reversals and abductions, is an elementary act of psychic hygiene — perhaps the elementary act.

Essay titlesHere’s something for you, student of comparative literature: contrast the treatment of feet in HCA’s “The Red Shoes” (vain girl in scarlet slippers is condemned to dance without cease, until her feet are hacked off at the ankles) with their treatment in the Saunders tale “My Flamboyant Grandson” (Korean War vet out shopping suffers bleeding-feet syndrome, which interferes with the ability of an all-seeing marketing conglomerate to read the “information strips” on his shoes and thus determine his personal preferences). Anything? Nothing?

Then try this: investigate each author’s relationship, as a stylist, to the vernacular. Saunders writes the best dialogue in America, all TV-damaged and lumpy with half-think but somehow queerly sincere, even at the threshold of total sarcasm — our current folk language, maybe. HCA, meanwhile, scandalized the Danish critical establishment with the chattiness of his stories, which included (in the words of one commentator) “frequent asides or parentheses; little bits of Copenhagen slang; much grammatical license.”

HCA’s first translators unanimously missed the point, producing English versions so brittle and archaized they rather resemble the Saunders mini-story “Woof: A Plea of Sorts,” in which a dog called Biscuit writes a letter to his master: “I suspect you may be surprised upon surmising this missive. . . . You have perchance never heretofore imagined me, in the dark of night, pen clasped between ‘toes,’ standing upon hind legs.” The thrust of Biscuit’s letter is that, if his master persists in the practice of standing naked in the kitchen singing “Purple Rain,” his loyal hound will bite him in the “member.”

Un-storytelling
“If the art of storytelling has become rare,” wrote Walter Benjamin in his 1936 essay “The Storyteller,” “the dissemination of information has had a decisive share in this state of affairs. Every morning brings us the news of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event any longer comes to us without already being shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information.” Saunders has a name for this phenomenon: he calls it Megaphone Guy. “Megaphone Guy is a storyteller,” he writes in “The Braindead Megaphone,” “but his stories are not so good. Or rather, his stories are limited. His stories have not had time to gestate — they go out too fast and to too broad an audience.”

Maine storyteller heads away for audiences We here at the Phoenix don't pull this kind of thing often, but this weekend you're missing out. Lewiston native (and Munjoy Hill dweller) Michael Parent has headed 1000 miles southwest from Portland to the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee, this weekend.

Portland's new wolf pack A poetry collection adapted for the stage has been taken up as the inspiration for a new Portland theater troupe.

Purity Ring | Shrines Ever imagined what it would be like to hear an angel-voiced woman recite a book of fairy tales in the back of a nightclub at 2 am as drowsy synth lines float through the speakers?

God Hates FAQs Editors' note: We selected David S. Bernstein to serve as our resident Rapture expert, on account of his having seen all three Kirk Cameron Left Behind series film adaptations.

Hearts of glass In Ali Shaw’s debut novel, death by glass becomes a star-crossed love story in the vein of a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale — a tragedy that strips away its isolated characters’ fears and defenses and reveals their bravery.

Twelve sweet ideas for Maine in 2012 With the new year upon us, we're looking into the future to see what things will be making Maine better in the coming 12 months. Here's a selection of things we'll be watching — and you should, too.

Mirthful morbidity Greenville painter Greg Stones writes that he sketches a basic landscape or figure study, "then I try to think of what would make the painting especially awesome. Penguins, zombies, and nudes are invariably the answer."

GETTING TO KNOW PHILIP LARKIN WITH A NEW EDITION OF HIS POEMS | April 26, 2012 "A smash of glass and a rumble of boots/Electric trains and a ripped-up phonebooth/Paint-spattered walls and the cry of a tomcat/Lights going out, and a kick in the balls." These lines are not by Philip Larkin, of course — they're by Paul Weller.

BLACK SABBATH ARE BACK — IN PRINT AND ON FILM | November 14, 2011 The literature on Black Sabbath — already extensive — will continue to grow, as we try, try, try again to wrap our poor noggins around the irreducibly cosmic fact of this band.